Asian elephants’ picky diet helps shape their forest home, study shows

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• A new study based on close observations of the foraging behavior of Asian elephants in a Malaysian forest highlights the “profound” impact of the giant herbivores on plant and tree diversity.

• The findings suggest that by selectively feeding on their preferred food plants, such as grasses, palms, liana vines and fast-growing trees, elephants are can shape the structure of their rainforest home.

• The researchers call for more conservation focus on elephants given their important influence on forest ecosystem health and globally important processes like carbon sequestration.

• The team also suggests the findings could be applied to practical conservation solutions aiming to restore wildlife corridors and improve the condition of reserves for megafauna species.

Asian elephants have long been described as forest “cleaners” by the Orang Asli people of Peninsular Malaysia who have lived alongside the giant mammals for tens of thousands of years. A new study looking closely at the foraging behavior of free-roaming elephants backs up this ancestral understanding, demonstrating that through their feeding habits, Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) do indeed shape, or “clean,” their environment by keeping certain types of understory plants in check.

The findings, published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, show that by selectively feeding on their preferred food plants, such as grasses, palms, liana vines and fast-growing trees, elephants influence plant and tree diversity and ultimately shape the structure of their forest home.

The researchers closely observed the foraging preferences and patterns of five wild-born female captive elephants freely roaming through mature and early successional forests in Krau Wildlife Reserve, a 62,395-hectare (154,181-acre) swath of protected forest in Peninsular Malaysia.

The elephants exhibited several previously undocumented behaviors, including pulling down liana vines from the canopy and unearthing roots of tuberous plants like gingers. In the mature forest, they typically made a beeline for palms; whereas in the more open ground of the young forest, where palms were scarcer, they took a higher proportion of tree saplings.

“The contrasting preference could mean that they have different ecological impacts in different environments and landscapes,” study lead author Lisa Ong, a doctoral candidate at China’s Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, told Mongabay in an email.

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